Portal:Culture

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Introduction

Celebrations, rituals and patterns of consumption are important aspects of folk culture.

Culture (/ˈkʌlər/) is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies; these include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, and such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

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In the news

15 January 2019 – Prayagraj Kumbh 2019
The largest human gathering in the world, the Kumbh Mela festival, starts at Prayagraj (previously known as Allahabad), India. More than 120 million Hindu devotees, as well as tourists, are expected. (The Guardian)
13 January 2019 –
A man stabs the Mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, on stage at a Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity event in Gdańsk, Poland. (The Guardian)
6 January 2019 –
The death toll from a storm that devastated the Philippines shortly after Christmas rises to 126. (News24)
5 January 2019 – 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism
Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I signs the independence decree ('tomos') officially separating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church as autocephalous Church. (NPR)
2 January 2019 – China–United States trade war (2018–present)
American electronics maker Apple warns that iPhone sales are slowing significantly and the product is in weak demand, blaming trade tensions with China. The company says that it has lowered its expected fiscal earnings for the first quarter as a result, citing disappointing holiday sales figures, and that it could lose $9 billion due to the decline. (The Verge)
2 January 2019 – Indigenous territories of Brazil
President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro issues a decree to place the responsibility for "identification, delimitation, demarcation and registration of lands traditionally occupied by indigenous people" at the Ministry of Agriculture, instead of the indigenous peoples affairs agency, FUNAI. The management of public forests also goes to the agriculture ministry. The move is seen as a big win for the industrial agribusiness lobby. (Reuters)

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